Editor’s Letter: Divine Interventions
These inspired additions, updates, and overhauls use historic buildings as raw material for new ways of living.
These inspired additions, updates, and overhauls use historic buildings as raw material for new ways of living.
Back in 2021, recently vaccinated but not yet dining indoors, I came across a listing for a house in New Orleans. It looked like a typical shotgun from the late 19th century, a wooden box with some gingerbread filigree. But it was huge, as if someone constrained the proportions in Photoshop and dragged a typical home to four times its size. Swiping through photos, I realized that it contained a massive ballroom where a normal living room might be.
It got even weirder. The kitchen had a curved archway. And was that an omega symbol in the wallpaper? Some kind of signet or sigil in the parlor? The house became a bit of an obsession. What was this place? But as with many a Zillow romance, I cast it aside with barely an alert set.
I always wondered who bought it, however. Then, a couple of years later, I found out. John Cameron Mitchell, the creator of Hedwig and other culture-defining characters, had acquired the home, which, I learned, was formerly a church and then the local headquarters of the storied occultist group the OTO—sigils, go figure. (He told me he and the previous owners closed for $666,000.) Cameron Mitchell was in the process of renovating it, though, as you’ll see, some of its more esoteric details stayed.
When I visited in late October, the front door was open and neighbors were dropping in. Some were actors and entertainment-industry types, but others were woodworkers, stained-glass makers, designers, builders, DJs—creative people from around the city united by curiosity and a very strange, very welcoming place. In a city choked by gentrification, the house might have been sliced into a dozen short-term rentals, but Cameron Mitchell plans to keep it a gathering space, as it has been for at least a century.
Similarly, all of the homes in this issue represent a spirit of treating historic structures as material to be artfully reinvented but respected. In Todos Santos, Mexico, a chef reoriented a brick structure around an outdoor kitchen for entertaining guests. A three-story concrete addition, a mini tower, really, is completely concealed from the street but allows views of the ocean and spectacular sunsets. Meanwhile, in southern France, an artist turned an imposing, 1,000-year-old stone fortification into a home and studio. The walls are landmarked, so indirect natural light perfect for painting filters in through a series of carefully placed skylights in the roof.
Though they’ve all had creative updates, each of these homes retains something of its past life while providing a canvas for new ideas that I hope would work in any home, historic or otherwise.
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